Wikipedia Investigating Suspicious Edits

By Geoffrey A. Fowler

The editors behind Wikipedia are accusing a set of contributors of manipulating the content of the community-generated encyclopedia on an unprecedented scale.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation Inc., which supports the volunteers who create and edit the site, on Monday took the unusual step of speaking out about an investigation into suspicious articles on organizations and products that may have been edited by people with conflicts of interest.

The foundation’s announcement came after volunteer Wikipedia investigators said several hundred accounts may have been used as “sockpuppets” to deceive other editors about their true identities.

Top editors have banned more than 250 editor accounts and identified dozens of articles that might have been tainted, on topics ranging from entrepreneurs to dot-com businesses. Few of the articles identified so far relate to household corporate names.

“It looks like it is manipulation on a scale and a level that we haven’t seen before in the encyclopedia,” said Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation’s executive director. “There has never been an investigation of this scope, scale, duration and seriousness.”

The Foundation has yet to decide what steps, if any, it will take, Ms. Gardner said.

The Wikipedia volunteer investigators themselves have said only that the edits come from “a group of hired writers who collaborate without ever using talk pages to communicate with each other.”

In its own investigation, the website Daily Dot reported that the suspicious activity appears linked to a public relations firm called Wiki-PR.

In an email in response, Wiki-PR CEO Jordan French said his company is a research and writing firm that counsels clients on how to adhere to Wikipedia’s rules. “We follow those rules,” Mr. French wrote.

“We do paid editing and not paid advocacy,” Mr. French wrote. “Our primary goal is to improve Wikipedia.”

While it is largely invisible to readers, Wikipedia’s community of editors regularly investigates and vets contributions, sometimes causing conflicts with users who violate—intentionally or unintentionally—the site’s rules regarding neutrality.

Companies engaged in self-promotion on Wikipedia have faced scrutiny in the past. In 2007, a researcher created a service called WikiScanner that unveiled the purported real identities of many Wikipedia editors, revealing many cases in which editors were contributing to articles on themselves or their employers.

Many marketing firms and corporate PR departments have learned how to influence Wikipedia articles without upsetting the site’s volunteer editors. Such steps can include posting a note on the discussion page for an article suggesting that someone else make a correction or addition. The Chartered Institute for Public Relations created a guide for PR people on how to edit articles.

At issue in the current controversy are questions about the limits of paying editors to edit articles on Wikipedia. While the encyclopedia has been open to experts such as university professors editing articles in their area of research, it frowns on paid editing for promotional purposes, which it calls “paid advocacy editing.”

Ms. Gardner said that such “black hat” editing violates Wikipedia’s core principles, and could undermine reader trust in the site.